politics

Fwiw in Florida we have what's called a homestead exemption. You get a big slice of your property value axed for taxation purposes if you live in the home. You have to pay full tax on any other properties. I believe tax rate increases are capped for homes with the exemption as well, but that might be for all homes. I don't remember exactly.

I want to see an exponential property tax so you could have a house and something like a small cabin somewhere but anything more and then your tax multiplier is based on how many properties you own, you'd have to control for businesses trying to own property in an employee's name, this might even help with large chain businesses not becoming a monopoly but hard to say if that's a huge benefit or a monkey paw type thing

They did this in 2008-09 with an 8k payment to homebuyers that wasn't a loan and didn't have to be repaid. This enabled me to but a foreclosed house and make it livable, and I've been living in it since then. It didn't raise prices in my area, because no one was buying houses anyway because regular possible couldn't afford it.

I don't know if I would have been able to get so financially situated if that payment wasn't there. I could've bought the house, but I would not have been able to fix it enough to ever stay on top of the maintenance and bills.

Would this be exactly the same situation? I dunno. But I know a similar push sure worked in the past.

It does rather sound like proposing an immediate 25k hike in house prices, yeah.

The fact that it's limited to first-time house buyers will at least help mitigate some of the advantage that commercial real estate buyers have over ordinary folks that are just trying to get a roof over their heads.

At worst, youre partially right. Maybe they'd go up 10K, but certainly not 25K. That's just not how markets work. It's the same argument as saying UBI will increase prices - yes, it will, but not by more than or as much as the UBI is. If everybody else sells their home at $25K more, you can sell yours in a month by going down to $15K more than before.

Yeah a similar policy in the UK (from 10ish years ago) is one of the biggest reasons for hugely inflated prices among small properties.

Obviously, the only real solution is to work to lower real-estate prices, but that would be unpopular with most home owners (who are a majority in the US).

It's the reason colleges here are stupid expensive as well. Greed.

It still shifts the balance of power in favour of first time home buyers. Landlord fucks have to pay extra.

Watched the same thing happen on a smaller scale back when analog TV broadcasting was phased out and we got vouchers for digital TV tuners in America. They all cost around $25 or less. As soon as the vouchers were given out, the prices doubled to $50

Surely this is a well studied phenomenon with a name, right?

I don't think this will happen so literally but to your point this is a supply issue. All this does is increase effective demand (i.e. the number of people able to purchase a home). This is a band-aid over a hole in a sinking ship.

Well, its only for first time buyers, so that will temper things. I predict homes will only go up about $23k.

On top of that just pumping support money into real estate doesn't fix either of the core problems: people aren't being paid enough to afford homes and we're not building enough homes to keep prices reasonable. The end result of this is that home prices inflate even further. If we treated houses as housing rather than investment vehicles we could actually do something about our housing crisis.

Only thing that will stem the demand is a massive house construction scheme and outright building new cities.

Even this won’t work, because we already have more houses than people. The issue is that corporations bought up all the houses, and are intentionally letting them sit vacant. The end goal is artificially reducing the supply, so they can sell fewer homes at exorbitant rates.

Basically, imagine there are 1000 homes, for 1000 people. Each home goes for an even $100k at fair market value. Big Corporation buys 250 of them, (for a grand total of $25M) and lets 200 sit vacant. Now the remaining vacant homes are going for more than $100k, because the supply has been artificially reduced. Now when they sell those 50 homes, they can do so at $300k each, making a total of $10M (that’s $15M from their 50 sales, minus the $5M they paid for the 50 originally) off of just 50 houses. If they just bought and flipped all the houses, they’d only be making small profits per house. But by sitting on a bunch of them, they’re able to make more per house.

In short, they made absolute bank on those 50 houses, and can now buy more houses to repeat the process. They haven’t made all of their money back (yet) but they don’t care about the short term because they can just repeat the process again and continue driving rates up.

So when they eventually sell those 200 homes they’ve been sitting on, they can do so at those exorbitant prices that the market has come to expect. And when it causes the market to crash (because they’re no longer letting houses sit vacant) it’s the homeowners who are all underwater on their mortgages. So the company is able to get away scot-free by ditching their supply, while the homeowners get fucked.

Landlords are also doing the same thing, where they’ll own 1000 units but only rent 200 of them, so they can charge higher rent on those 200, while the rest sit empty.

What they need to do is implement a scaling tax for vacant homes. The more vacant homes you own, the higher the property tax is on each one. So the upper-middle class people can still own a summer and winter home without getting fucked. But make it unprofitable to buy and sit on hundreds of vacant properties, just to artificially reduce the supply. If a home or apartment is vacant for more than one calendar month in the year, it counts towards your vacant property tax. Incentivize the sale and rental of homes, instead of allowing them to quietly buy up and sit on properties.

I'd argue we don't necessarily need more homes. I think what most cities need is really to end zoning.

There is more than enough commercial and industrial vacant properties over the US that could very feasibly be turned into residential housing to house every person ten times over.

Zoning really is the problem because developers are essentially being forced to build unwalkable communities. You're just not allowed in many cities to buy old warehouse space and develop it into housing or to build small businesses (groceries, shops, etc) in areas zoned residential.

Ending/reforming zoning would solve so many issues... (I say /reforming because there are limits, most people don't want to live 10ft from a factory). But I hardly hear anyone talking about it whether on Lemmy or in the media... but it seems like it would fix so many issues.

Incentivizing new construction for homes people actually live in is another facet of her plan.

You're right this won't help - all it will do is push up the average house price by 25k. Freezing prices won't do anything except drive shortage and lower quality property. Everything you mentioned will work once until people realize they can take advantage of it. We've seen it before - price freezes don't help.

It is well known what we need to do.

• make property a bad investment. Heavily tax vacant properties and ownership of multiple, improve renters rights, increase interest rates for investment purchases. The goal is to drive down Qd quickly, reducing the value of other owned properties.

• significantly drive up quality housing stock - Increase of Qs. Tax breaks for new builds, government rent to own, density and infrastructure increases. No tax on new builds owned for 10 years. Longer plan that solves long term.

Increasing housing supply is explicitly part of her announced plan. Are you under the impression that this was the entirety of her announced economic plan?

It will absolutely help with high property values. It will help them go higher. Same with student debt forgiveness.

For the record, I’m in favor of both

She wants to build 3 million more houses too. but that's not exactly as good of a headline as "Hey first time home buyers! Vote for her and you'll get 25k"